Every year for New Years Eve, my parents would take us to their friend’s big house - it was like a house out of a movie. There was a spiral staircase, and a fire place so big a professional wrestler could stand up inside it. And unlike many of the boring adults that my parents would subject me and my brother to, the grownups who lived in this big movie house were attentive, kind, and funny.
There was a long drive involved in getting to the big movie house. We went over a white bridge, past Sing Sing Prison, and along side of a graveyard that seemed to go on for miles. My dad would tell me and my brother that we had to hold our breath while we were driving by the graveyard or the headless horseman would come for us. The panic I felt as I ran out of air was thrilling.
But, all this is beside the point. There was really only one point of these trips for me: Dubuffet books. I looked forward to seeing them every time. I knew Dubuffet was an artist, and I understood what an artist was because my parents were artists. But this Dubuffet guy was special. He saw the same world that I saw - a world full of cars, buildings, bikes, hats, messes, and mushy people. It looked like he didn’t care about rules. It looked like he just wanted to make pictures - the same way that I just wanted to make pictures. And he had his pictures in books. The kind of books you leave out for guests. And I loved that, once a year, I got to be a guest at a house with Dubuffet books.
Jean Dubuffet – Parages frequentes (Busy Neighbourhood), 1979. Acrylic on paper (with 28 cutout elements) mounted on canvas, 27 1/2 x 40 1/8 in